Articles by Brian Beutler

Yet more energy bill woes

This may seem narrow and technical, but it's actually extremely significant:

The White House has raised last-minute concerns over regulation of automobile emissions and fuel economy that aides said Tuesday could lead to a presidential veto of the energy bill now before Congress.

The bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate, requires automakers to meet a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, but does not specify which government agency should enforce the new rule.

Primary regulation of mileage standards has historically fallen to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an arm of the Transportation Department. But vehicle tailpipe emissions are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a Supreme Court ruling this year affirmed the E.P.A.'s authority to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from passenger vehicles, which basically would mean regulating their fuel use.

The administration's argument is that the energy bill will create unnecessary confusion over which agency has proper jurisdiction over mileage standards. And at a glance it seems like a reasonable argument. But, of course, it's absolutely not reasonable at all.

This is better understood as a bank-shot effort by the Bush administration to block the EPA from functionally regulating carbon emissions from automobiles on behalf of the interest groups that don't want to be bothered with reducing auto pollution.

Henry Waxman weighs in on Bush admin. efforts to suppress climate science

The House Oversight committee has released its official report (PDF) on White House efforts to interfere with climate change science, and its conclusions are ... well, totally predictable. To wit:

The Committee's 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.

The sheer volume and magnitude of chicanery, when laid out in nearly 30 pages of detail, betrays a remarkably fastidious program of misinformation.

I suppose it's in the nature of things that many of the sub rosa efforts to tamper with the findings of real scientists would leak to the press and the Congress. After all, it's only Bush appointees who take an oath -- explicit or otherwise -- to uphold the president. The scientists who work in those appointees' agencies, on the other hand, were apparently pretty upset about all of this.

Edwards reacts

John Edwards is the first leading candidate to respond to the advance of the Lieberman-Warner bill:

Boxer statement

Barbara Boxer is, of course, glowing: